Chaos within Yasser Arafat's own organisation makes it even harder for Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms

THE prospect of a meeting, perhaps next week, between Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, and his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon, is concentrating minds, both within and outside the snakepit of regional and local politics. It would be the pair's first handshake since Mr Qurei took up the poisoned chalice of his job in October. The Egyptians, in particular, whose intelligence chief has been secretly chatting to Mr Sharon, want to know how the Gaza Strip, which abuts Egypt's Sinai peninsula, will be administered if, as Mr Sharon promised a month ago, Israel removes the Jewish settlements from the area. And the foreign minister of Jordan, the other Arab country most directly concerned, put his finger on one of the most vexing problems that would arise in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. “Will the Palestinian Authority be prepared for the task of managing the region?”

Many people, Palestinian and Israeli, have doubts. Hence the urgency with which Fatah, the beefiest group under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, is trying to rejuvenate itself. Yet, by calling a party conference to be held within a year, Fatah may worsen its own rifts. And the standing of its leader, Yasser Arafat, who also presides over the Palestinian Authority (PA), may fall still further.

A reverse Arabic acronym for “the movement for the liberation of Palestine”, Fatah, under Mr Arafat's leadership, has always been at the heart of the Palestinians' struggle for self-determination. But it long ago lost its shine. The movement's effectiveness has been crushed by the intifada and Israel's aggressive response; it has not held an election for 15 years; and it is deeply and painfully at odds with itself.

The rift goes back as far as the 1993 Oslo accords. Fatah has supported the peaceful two-state principle since the late 1980s, but half the 11-member Central Council opposed the terms of the agreement with Israel negotiated secretly in the Norwegian capital. However, Fatah and the PA, which was set up after the Oslo accords to run the West Bank and Gaza, soon became closely identified. Key posts in the authority have always gone to Fatah members loyal to Mr Arafat, some of them notorious for their corruption. Directly elected president of the PA in 1996, Mr Arafat sees any attempt to change this system of patronage as a threat to his leadership. So, as the PA limps on, trying to run the territories under the impossible conditions of Israel's closures and semi-occupation, so limps the top civilian echelon of Fatah.

At the same time, many Fatah leaders followed the Palestinian “street” in believing that if they were ever to win real independence, they had to pursue a dual policy of negotiations and armed attacks. After the start of the latest intifada in 2000, a special Fatah unit was created for operations against Israel, known as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

The fact that the Martyrs Brigades are not under the PA's control gives Mr Arafat freedom to condemn their operations. But his connection with Fatah's military wing is a point of contention. To begin with, the Fatah military groups eschewed suicide-bombing and aimed most of their operations at targets—Jewish settlers as well as Israeli soldiers—in the West Bank and Gaza and few in Israel proper. But with the radical Islamist outfits, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, winning Palestinian plaudits for suicide attacks inside Israel, Fatah, not to be politically outdone, followed suit.

Its actions, however, do not seem to have won it the support it sought: witness the university elections held in December. These student-council elections, traditionally a marker of the public mood, were expected to show an upturn in Fatah's fortunes. In the event, the results were a resounding blow to Fatah, with Hamas and Islamic Jihad adding to their seats on most campuses.

Fatahcidal

In the aftermath of the student elections, Fatah's internal differences over strategy, leadership and the allocation of severely limited resources came fiercely to the surface. In some places, personal disputes and power struggles became armed battles. Recently the mayor of Nablus, the West Bank's biggest town, resigned in protest at the PA's failure to sort out rows within the local Fatah branch that had caused havoc in what he called his “dying city”. Mr Arafat once mediated in such disputes. Now, confined by Israel to his decrepit quarters in Ramallah, he is no longer able to do so. The leadership's unpopularity has been accentuated by the apparent attempts of security men thought to be close to Mr Arafat to intimidate Palestinian journalists, in the West Bank and Gaza, who have written candidly about the chaos and corruption in the PA, and in Fatah.

The quarrel is often said to be between Fatah's “new” and “old” guards: insiders from the West Bank and old PLO men who came from exile. But the differences criss-cross this divide. On both sides, many Palestinians think that the al-Aqsa Brigades, or at least those cells still loyal to Fatah, should be reined in. Others say that the strategy itself must change.

These, the keenest reformers, look to the party conference heralded recently by Mr Arafat, and hope that an array of younger people will oust the old guard at the top. One snag is that under present conditions, with the Israeli army keeping tight screws on the West Bank and Gaza, it will be impossible for a fully representative conference to take place, let alone one that includes participants from Fatah's far-flung diaspora. The splits, and the festering of Mr Arafat's leadership, are intensified as Hamas continues its hideous suicide bombings, challenging Fatah to match it.

Meanwhile, if the Israelis do leave Gaza, it is unclear whether Mr Arafat's loyalists or other, much more extreme people—in Hamas, for instance—will fill the void. And that, in turn, would hardly be the best way to get the parties back on the almost-out-of-sight American- and European-backed “road map” to peace.